Intermittent black screens

[toonarama]

Hello there

My PCS PC has been working fine until the last week or so when the screen display started disappearing for a couple of seconds before returning without displaying any error message. It seemed as though it might have been triggered when browsing the internet but this may be a red herring.

I was putting up with it but today following installation of the latest windows 10 update it got a whole lot worse. The display disappeared every couple of seconds and when I tried to close down the PC it restarted so I believe that meant windows was crashing.

I've rolled back the latest windows update although I know it will rear it's head again very soon and I can power down again ok.

I have the most up-to-date drivers for my GTX970, indeed there have been a couple of new versions recently, don't know whether this is relevant.

So can I ask whether anyone else is having similar problems, searching the internet reveals lots of people with similar problems and even more possible solutions, but I really don't want to start fiddling around with settings based on no real knowledge.

Alternatively can anyone suggest where I could start investigating. I am guessing this is more likely a software problem rather than hardware related, I am in the second year of my silver cover so I could return but don't want to incur all the expense and trouble if it is not hardware related.

Thank you for reading and hoping someone can shine some light,

Mick

 

[ubuysa]

This sounds to me like Windows Explorer is crashing - not IE but the system that runs your desktop (explorer.exe), it's configured to restart itself but you see a black screen whilst it does that. If your PC restarts on shutdown then something in WIndows is definitely crashing, Windows is configured to restart if a failure occurs.

Common causes of explorer.exe crashing are buggy context menu items; these are the items that appear in the drop down menu when you right-click on a file or folder, they are installed by applications that you install. Often you can disable them in the settings option for each application, you can also hack the registry to disable them, but I wouldn't recommend that. The best way to disable them temporarily for testing or permanently if you choose is to download Ccleaner from https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner. In the Tools > StartUp menu of Ccleaner you can temporarily disable most third-party context menu items to see whether they are your problem. It's worth getting Ccleaner in any case, it's the best tool for garbage cleaning too.

 

[toonarama]

Thanks ubuysa, I'll give your suggestions a go